First posted November 04, 2016 NB – Thank you Avijit, for this perceptive and timely warning. Those who want to protect democracy and the right to dissent need themselves to uphold dialogue and save higher education campuses from the destructive polemic that has overtaken radical politics over the years. Here is something I wrote on the… Read More Avijit Pathak: JNU’s enemy without, within (2016)
First posted February 22, 2016 NB: This post deals with the political debate sparked off by the recent events in JNU. It is for the consideration of ordinary students as well as other concerned individuals, in India and abroad. It is offered in the belief that a forthright dialogue on divisive themes is the only way… Read More What is to be Undone (2016)
By Eve Ottenberg / CounterPunch Western Europe depleted its armory by shipping everything to Ukraine to get blown up by the Russians. That creates a huge market opportunity for the U.S. weapons industry, which thus also eyes potential South American customers; hence its eagerness for some nations there to send their Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, to… Read More US Weapons Makers on a Marketing Spree
Dilip Simeon Beginnings and Endings Topology of Violence, by Byung-Chul Han Theodor Adorno – Education After Auschwitz (1966) Treason of the Intellectuals
The argument that corporations must be treated like real people… is in my view preposterous. Corporations are legal fictions. They have no opinions of their own to contribute and no rights to participate with equal voice or vote in politics: Richard Dworkin By Ralph Nader / RalphNader.org No other institutions consistently Rule over as Much in… Read More Rescue Our Democratic Society: Constitutionally Render Corporations Unequal to Humans
First posted April 06, 2020 George Russell Lakey (born 2 November 1937) is an activist, sociologist, and writer who added academic underpinning to the concept of nonviolent revolution. He also refined the practice of experiential training for activists which he calls “Direct Education”. A Quaker, he has co-founded and led numerous organizations and campaigns for justice and peace.” Emergencies… Read More George Lakey on Capitalism, public health and the Nordic model / Noam Chomsky nails the most overlooked element of the pandemic
By Lynn Parramore / Institute for New Economic Thinking When you think of original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve, an economics class probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. After all, economics is a secular discipline. Or is it? Maybe not entirely, considering that the earliest economic thinkers had religion very… Read More The Original Sin of Economics
Adam Tooze This Valentines day, Americans gifted each other in the order of 58 million pounds of chocolate, much of it wrapped in 36 million heart-shaped boxes. It was a particularly busy period for the global chocolate industry, which in 2020 processed c. 5 million tons of cocoa beans into chocolate confectionary, generating around 130 billion dollars… Read More The Closing of the Cocoa Frontier
His power as a writer came not only from the beauty of his poetry, but his deep understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions that go into making a human being and a human society. He grasped that human history is merely itself. It moves towards no goal. By Chris Hedges / The Real News Network Shakespeare’s… Read More Shakespeare and the Politics of the 21st Century
Read an extract from It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism by Tim Adams fter the State of the Union address at the beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece that argued: “Joe Biden is Bernie Sanders.” By this it meant that, somehow, by stealth, under the cover of darkness, a “democratic socialist” – both words apparently… Read More Bernie Sanders: ‘Oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? They run the US as well’
